


slow down, slow down

by lilaliacs



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Found Family, M/M, Superpowers, but also read the notes, ten centric, ten is five, the relationship tags are just bc i didnt wanna leave it empty im sorry, the umbrella academy au, they get like one line each, this is all about the family bond, time travelling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-26
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-11-06 05:37:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17933852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilaliacs/pseuds/lilaliacs
Summary: Johnny and Taeyong are with Kun and the way they step in with serious expressions and stay silent for along moment after the door falls shut behind them makes Ten feel like he's 12, and in trouble.“You can't keep doing this.” Taeyong says, finally. Before Ten can tell him to save his breath, and inform him that he's already had that conversation with Kun, Johnny jumps in and adds: “Not alone.”





	slow down, slow down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sourpastels](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sourpastels/gifts).



> first of all a few disclaimers, pls read this
> 
> -this is a fic i wrote for my best friend in one sitting in the middle of the night so like. dont expect literary greatness. ily shannon happy birthday <3  
> \- this doesnt follow the plot of tua its just the setting and the apocalypse thing  
> \- as the tags say, ten is basically five (the numbers as names thing was what made me write this) but i didnt think i could write the whole 58 yo in the body of a 13 yo SO: ten spent 5 years in the future, while the others lived 5 years in real time, and then he came back, no deaging, just all of them 5 years older  
> -all of them have powers and numbers ofc but i didnt get to include it all so if you have questions or are curious dont hesitate to ask  
> -that being sad apologies for only writing 10 of them, it was hard enough like this i couldnt possibly have fit everyone in there just so many
> 
> lastly, some trigger warnings: the apocalypse is a very present theme, which ten had pretty traumatic experiences with, theres talk about death and past emotional and physical child abuse. that being said i tried to not make it as dark as this all suggests. 
> 
> okay now enjoy <333

Starting February 5th, 1995, spanning to the last recorded instance on August 13th 2000, a series of peculiar instances took place. Ten women gave birth in that time, nothing unusual in itself of course, but it was notable that none of the women had been pregnant before the morning they went into labour. An acclaimed Korean scientist, Lee Sooman, took note of the events, hearing about them a few months after the sixth of the children was born. He began his studies first in private, keeping it to theories and notebooks over notebooks, but by the time he took note of the seventh child a peculiar kind of report had started tickling in. The children had started to exhibit peculiar behaviour, abilities the reports couldn’t quite define but described with words such as “ _inhuman_ ” and “ _supernatural_ ”. 

Lee Sooman started his journey across Asia in the autumn of 1999, visiting each documented family with the sole purpose of taking in these extraordinary children. The oldest two were also the first to be sent to his estate in Korea, their parents scared and without means to support a child they didn’t plan on further, not when it “spoke like ghosts”, the grandmother of the first had hissed. Number One was a quiet boy, barely spoke anything, not out loud. _Telepathy_ , Lee Sooman jotted down in his notes. 

The second family hadn’t even spoken to him much, had nearly immediately agreed to their son to leave. There were records in the notes, about a story Number Two had told the estate’s housekeeper, Joohyun, of his mother playing a game with him when he was little. She would push him off the roof of the house they lived in, a five story building in the outskirts of a small town, and he would get back up without a scratch, walk back to her and let her do it again. _Indestructible_ , the notes said. 

The other parents weren’t quite as easily convinced. 

Sooman convinced them that it would be the best for the children and their families, promising his estate to be the only place of protection for the boys to some, promising help with their abilities so others. In one particular instance, Number Five, a woman had given her three year old into the care of his helpers only after making him promise he would be able to “dispose of him”. He hadn’t thought much of it, writing down _Unconditional Persuasion_ in his notebook, but Joohyun had shuddered when he’d told her and took the boy in her arms as if to protect him. 

None of them needed protection, Sooman told her over and over again, but if she was going to coddle them and make them more pliable to his plans, he wouldn’t keep her from it. She gave them names, different ones than their mothers had because Sooman insisted on it, but names nonetheless. He always thought it was a sign of weakness, a disruption of his order, and reprimanded them when he heard them use any kind of nicknames in training. But he understood that in the privacy of the estate, outside of their lessons, their names served them as some sort of bond. A stronger bond meant a strong team, so he allowed it whenever Joohyun informed him of a new name for a new recruit. 

Overall, the process took him nearly ten years. The last boy was a particularly tough one. 

When he found him, he was 7 years old, and his mother would not budge no matter what she was promised. She simply wouldn’t understand the importance her son had for the well-being of the world, as much as he tried to make her see. 

After about two years of repeated prodding, he changed his focus to the boy himself. He told him everything he told his mother. He told him only the truth of course: His mother was holding him back from being something special, something great, from saving the world he lived in. 

Number Ten joined the Academy the next spring, just phasing into existence at the breakfast table and scaring Number Seven into dropping a glass of orange juice. It had never been complicated for him to ran away, he said. _Teleportation_ It said in his notes. _(powerful)_ scribbled behind it as if an after-thought. 

***

“Ten,” The voice winds through the fog of his mind, half hung up on the dream it was just ripped from, half still immersed in it. “ _Ten._ ” 

He blinks his eyes open, forcing himself to pay the imagery of fire and flames, of destruction and dust no mind as he looks up at Kun’s disapproving frown. “Good morning!” He chirps, as cheerily as his throat, dry from misuse, allows. 

“It’s 4AM.” Kun deadpans. Ten’s replying grin is unwavering. 

Kun sighs. He’s always doing that, sighing. “You can’t keep doing this to yourself.” 

He busies himself with organising some pens scattered on the desk Ten had just taken a refreshing nap on, as Ten leans back and follows his movements with his eyes. “What’s the alternative?” He asks, voice low and level. 

“An actual full night of sleep?” Kun huffs, looking him straight in the eye. “You not looking half-dead, every time we do get to see you?” 

Ten can feel his lips twist into a bitter grimace of a smile. “I think I prefer me being half-dead to the entire world being full-dead.” 

Again, Kun sighs. “We’re all doing everything we can, you know that.” 

“So am I!” 

“No, you’re killing yourself.” 

Kun never raises his voice. No matter what they throw at him, no matter how angry he is, Ten has never once heard him yell at them. Kun’s anger manifests in the way his fingers grip the sleeve of his sweater, in the way his eyebrows pinch and the slight waver in his voice as he tries his best to keep it out. Right now, Kun is angry. 

But Ten is, too. He doesn’t think he’s ever not been angry ever since he came back. 

His voice is as acidic as the air he breathed for 5 years when he hisses: “You would do the same if you saw what I saw.” 

A second later he wishes he hadn’t said it at all, when he sees something change in Kun’s eyes. “Ten…” He says again, and he hates it, hates the way it sounds like pity, sounds like Kun understands, like he cares. 

He stands up in one swift motion. “I’ll be going to bed.” 

He doesn’t think he can control his expression as he pushes past Kun and out of the living room, so he keeps his head down. When he’s reached the threshold, something makes him stop, some sort of instinct ingrained into him from childhood, some sort of sense for hierarchy and order that echoes within his brain in the voice of his father. He knows Kun hates it when any of them bring it up. 

He turns around, lifting two of his fingers to his head in a mocking salute. “Signing off, Number Four.” 

He ducks through the door before he has to see Kun’s frown. 

He is nearly all the way to his room when a door to his left opens. 

“Oh, hey!” Guanheng exclaims. “Did you--”

“Not now.” Ten mumbles as he pushes past him, too. 

“I was just wondering if--” 

“Guan, not now.” He repeats, trying to keep the bite out of his words. 

He’d been the closest to the younger, back before he jumped. Number Ten and Number Nine, the bottom of the food-chain, they used to joke. Outside of their father’s reign, their ranks didn’t matter, not to them and not to Joohyun, but it ingrained itself into their easily impressionable brains when they were kids, a system easy enough to understand, easier to follow so you do not get yelled at or punished. 

Taeyong hated it most out of all of them, not being cut out for the spot of Number One as a child as well as in his teens. Johnny took over when no one was looking, relaying the plan to everyone when they were on a mission as Taeyong was too caught up in his head, the perfect second in command. 

There were a few instances where even Jaemin took over the lead. Their father never noticed as his Number Eight turned a corner and never came back, having shapeshifted into a carbon copy of his older brother down to the exact shade of Taeyong’s ever-changing hair colour. 

None of them wanted to find out what would have happened if their father had ever noticed, the idea itself sending a shiver down their backs. 

Donghyuck was the one who had been at the receiving end of their father’s wrath the most, when they were growing up. 

“I should have disposed of you like your mother asked of me, Number Five.” They heard the old man spit countless of times, and it would make the excuses on Donghyuck’s tongue die in a heartbeat. They didn’t hear or see him for a few days afterwards, and he always came back a little less himself, taking longer each time to regain most of the fire he usually had in his eyes. It wasn’t something any of them hadn’t experienced in their childhood, their father’s punishments, and it wasn’t something any of them wished to repeat. 

It’s the memory of that punishment that makes Ten’s shoulders tense when the door to his room opens behind him and Guanheng steps in. 

“You can’t--” He starts to hiss, the reprimand ready at the tip of his tongue but it dies the next second. 

“Chill,” Guanheng words his thoughts. “The old man is dead, he can’t stop me from comforting you.” 

Ten turns his face from him again, towards his window. Moonlight falls through the window in sharp edges. “I don’t need comfort.” He says, barely more than a whisper. 

“Okay.” Guanheng nods, but he’s already getting comfortable on the far side of Ten’s bed, leaving enough room for him. 

“I’m sure Kun already told you, but you should go to sleep. It’s really late.” He mumbles when Ten doesn’t make a move away from the window. 

The sharp edges of the moonlight paint the courtyard outside in grey and black. Cold, colourless in a way that isn’t because everything is dead but because everything will come back alive in only a few hours when the sun goes up. 

Ten takes a deep breath. “Yeah. Yeah, I should.” 

* * *

When he was 17, Ten accidentally caused the end of the world. 

Looking back on it, it wasn’t actually his fault, it was something else, something he couldn’t have influenced with disobedience. According to calculations he completed on the 503rd day away from home, even Jeno was a more likely cause for the apocalypse than him, and the last time he’d seen Jeno he’d fallen asleep in his scrambled eggs at breakfast. Of course, the last time he’d seen Jeno had been 503 days ago, and it didn’t change the fact that when he was 17 and he opened his eyes to flames and nothingness, he was convinced he did it himself. 

“Impossible.” Their father had said, looking not at Ten but at his black cup of coffee. “Out of question.” 

“But father, you’ve seen the calculations, it has to be--” 

“I don’t care for your calculations, Number Ten. What I care for is your silence. Eat and then follow your brothers to the training room this instance.” 

“You’re not listening to me!” 

The old man set the cup down. “No, I’m not. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what kind of things _timetravel_ could cause.” 

“Neither do you.” Ten insisted. “You’ve never done it. You can’t even try, but I can. Imagine the things we could do--” 

“We’re not going to do anything. _You_ aren’t going to do anything, Number Ten.”

He had turned to the newspaper then, holding it up and blocking Ten from even looking at him. And Ten had turned away and never looked at him again, turned and ran out of the room, out of the house. In the main hall he heard Yukhei and Mark call after him, but he didn’t stop to listen, just jumped, then ran, jumped and suddenly he wasn’t there anymore. He was some place else, some time else, and he didn’t stop, right until he breathed in smoke. 

The end of the world had looked just like he pictured it when he heard the word in stories and books, and it had proceeded to look exactly the same all five years he’s spent in it. 

The absence of fire and death still disorients him, after nearly a month back, when he opens his eyes now. The normality and triviality of Guanheng stirring beside him, of the smell of breakfast wafting through the corridors, the sounds of his brothers waking up one by one feels somehow more dooming and disastrous now that he's seen it all gone for good and doesn't know how to stop it from disappearing. 

Like back then, he doesn't leave his room immediately as he wakes up, lets Guanheng sleep through the noise beyond his door for a little while more, eyes following the patterns the sun paints on his ceiling. Like back then, he hears the door next to his open, and like back then Yukhei calls “Ten, breakfast is ready!” 

His voice is deeper than it was when he was 15, the thump on Ten's door louder. He doesn't think Yukhei stopped growing in the five years he was gone. 

“Meet you downstairs.” He calls back, then turns to wake Guanheng. 

When they walk into the kitchen, everything is like it used to be. Joohyun is humming by the kitchen island, Mark next to her trying to help but probably just making a huge mess. It will be about five more minutes until Joohyun kindly tells him to sit down and stop fucking up breakfast for everybody else. Jaemin is throwing bits of soggy cornflakes across the table, the ones that hit target getting stuck in Jeno's hair. Jeno is dozing off, head dangerously close to his plate of eggs. Ten nearly wants to laugh. 

“Top of the morning to you.” Someone chirps right next to his ear. A cup of coffee is held threateningly close to his nose. “A little birdy told me you might be needing this.” 

He takes the cup from Donghyuck's hands with a little sigh and a glance in Kun's direction. He is deep in conversation with Taeyong and Johnny, nothing that Ten thinks he should be interrupting. It's disgustingly obviously even to himself in the confines of his own thoughts that the uncomfortable pull in his chest is fear. 

It's not until that night that he talks to Kun again. He shifted his research and notes to his own room after the night before, and he's in the middle of dozing off over them when a soft knock jolts him awake. 

Johnny and Taeyong are with Kun and the way they step in with serious expressions and stay silent for along moment after the door falls shut behind them makes Ten feel like he's 12, and in trouble. 

“You can't keep doing this.” Taeyong says, finally. Before Ten can tell him to save his breath, and inform him that he's already had that conversation with Kun, Johnny jumps in and adds: “Not alone.” 

Ten takes a moment to mull this over. “What do you mean?” He asks. 

None of them answer his question. Instead Taeyong steps forward and sits down next to him, sorting through some loose papers on the floor. He halts after a moment, looking at Ten directly and asks: “Why did you come back? You never told us.” 

The first thing Ten wants to give back is that it's a stupid question, that he's _told_ them about the impending apocalypse. The second thing is that both of them know very well that Taeyong could just pull the answer right from his head without having to ask. 

He can see in Taeyong's eyes that he knows that the first thing isn't the full answer, and that he's giving Ten the choice to not give him the full answer, but the chance to finally do. 

He sighs weakly and fixes his eyes on a bent corner of a book, smoothing over it with a finger. 

“I found all of you.” He whispers into the silence of the room. “In the ruins of this house. You were all dead.” 

He hears Kun suck in a sharp breath. It's the only noise in the room before he continues. “Every single one of you, dead, lifeless. I checked. You were all here, at home. Except for me. You all died but I wasn't there. Dad said I didn't know what a jump like that could do and--” 

“You didn't cause this.” Johnny cuts in. “You-- You aren't going to cause this.” 

Ten's heart is beating in his throat as he nods, his voice wavering slightly. “I know. But I wasn't even _there_. I should have been there with you, all of you, we should all have been together.” He can't seem to make himself stop. It's the most he's spoken in years. “And now I _am_ here, but there's so little time. There's barely any time and I already lost all of you, once a-and I-- I can't do it again. I need to stop it but there's no time and--” 

“ _We_ need to stop this.” Taeyong calmly interjects. 

When Ten only blinks at him, gaze suspiciously blurry, Taeyong lifts a hand and lays it on his shoulder. “You're not alone anymore, Ten. We're a team. We've always been a team.” 

“You need to stop trying to carry all of this alone, just because that's what you've been doing up until now.” A small smile spreads on Johnny's face before he continues. “As a small group of high school students once said: We're all in this together.” 

A watery laugh slips over Ten's lips. “We're trying to prevent the apocalypse and you're quoting Disney Channel Original Movies.” 

“Home, sweet home, right?” Kun smiles. 

Ten catches his gaze and his eyes are warm, forgiving. “Right.” He gives back. 

Taeyong claps his hands together. “It's awfully crammed in here. Let's move all this stuff back downstairs.” 

* * *  
It takes about a week for all of the other's to find out. 

On the second night they're about three hours into sorting through Ten's notes when the door creaks open. 

“Are you guys having a nerd sleepover?” Jaemin asks. None of them reply, and after a moment he shrugs and steps into the room. “Sounds lit, hand me an anti-apocalypse textbook.” 

Jaemin brings Jeno and Donghyuck the next night for back-up, as he says, the three of them claiming a whole mountain of articles to sort through in a corner by the fireplace, keeping each other from falling asleep until Taeyong insists they go to bed. 

Guanheng joins them when he finds Ten's room empty one evening, wordlessly sitting down with the other three by the fireplace. 

Yukhei finds them by accident on the way to get a midnight snack. When Mark walks into the living room the next night he asks why they are doing this in secrecy and the middle of the day when Taeyong had been preaching the importance of a sleep schedule since they were children and none of them had any important business to tend to in the day. 

“Finally.” Joohyun huffs when she walks in on them all pouring over files in the daylight. “The amount of coffee you guys were drinking was getting concerning.” 

* * *  
“Guys.” Mark says loudly into the busy silence of the living room after another few days of this. The word sounds as important as it can get, and they all turn their heads. 

Mark closes the book he had been reading with a loud thump and says: “What if Dad knew something?” 

“What would he have known?” Jaemin asks. 

“He was annoyingly eccentric, not psychic.” Donghyuck adds. 

“I don't know,” Johnny weighs in. “I wouldn't say I'd be surprised if Dad knew when the world was gonna end and kicked the bucket just before without telling anyone.” 

Yukhei nods. “Yeah, sounds like him.” 

Mark nods as well, much more urgency in it. “He has all these books in his study, maybe there's _something_ useful.” 

“You want to break into Dad's study?!” Jeno asks, eyes wide. Nearly immediately though, he halts, as if realising what he just said. “Who cares?” He answers himself. “He's dead. Let's break into Dad's study.” 

“The key is behind the ugly painting by the door!” Joohyun calls from the dining room. 

* * *

Once, when he was 14, Ten had been inside their father's study. It had been a dare, a mixture of Donghyuck and Jaemin egging him on and Taeyong telling him it was a terrible idea that made him jump through the door. 

The room behind it wasn't really anything special, ordinary in its opulence like the rest of the house. It was held clean and orderly, the spine of every book straight and imposing as the shelves towered over Ten. His father's eyes looked down on him from the oil painting behind the desk, the artist really having captured the ice that defined Lee Sooman's person. 

Their father had told him, calmly, over dinner, that his orders weren't to be ignored. All boys had frozen, until Sooman had finished his glass of water and slowly stood up, motioning for Ten to follow him. 

He spent the next three days in the same soundproof room Donghyuck was put in when he slipped up and used his power on their father, restrains around his wrists that somehow made it impossible to jump out. He hadn't dared to go anywhere near the study afterwards, right up until he left. 

Donghyuck steps next to him now as he stares up at the oil painting. The others went right to work, sorting through drawers and shelves, but Ten can't quite make himself move. 

“That's one ugly painting.” Donghyuck muses. “Hey, Johnny, can we have Jeno burn Dad's painting in the courtyard later?” 

Johnny doesn't look up from where he's leaning over the desk. “Yeah, sure, if Joohyun is okay with it.” 

“Fun.” Donghyuck cheers, then grabs a hold of Ten's hand and pulls him into the room unceremoniously, drowning out Jeno's complaints about how bad oil paint smells when burned by whistling a cheery melody. 

Ten thinks with all of them in here together, the room doesn't seem as cold. 

* * *

He doesn't know how long they spend in the study, when Kun makes a muffled noise. 

“What's up?” Johnny walks over to him, taking the book he has in his hands from him for a better look. 

“I think we found what we're looking for.” Kun says, cryptically. 

“Just like that?” Guanheng sounds suspicious. 

“I doubt Dad just has a whole book dedicated to stopping the apocalypse in his study.” Mark reasons in his direction, and Guanheng nods. 

“We can hope.” Yukhei throws in. 

“We can.” Johnny hums, eyes still flitting across the pages of what Kun found. 

Before any of the others can ask, Johnny reads: “ _The end of the world is a set event in history. A rock that guides the river of time. But no rock is indestructible, and at one point the passage of time can wear it away. The passage of time of course, would have to mean an impossible amount of it, and that again is cut short by the end of time as the human-made construct it is. It would need extraordinary power to break the rock before its time._ ” He stops, looking up. “This is a book dedicated to stop the apocalypse.” He states. 

* * * 

That night, the atmosphere in the house is something Ten hasn't ever seen in all his years living there. 

They gather in the courtyard and watch as Jeno lights their father's oil painting on fire. Johnny pours out a cup of coffee and they all say a few words. There's a lot of insults, a lot of jokes on the old man's expense. They talk about things they had managed to keep secret from him. Joohyun smiles a very peculiar smile when she shares a few stories of her own. 

Afterwards, they move to the living room, Joohyun unlocks their father's liquor cabinet and then retires for the night. The boys sit, and make their way through bottles of wine they can't pronounce. 

They catch Ten up on every little thing that has happened since he left, from the time Yukhei broke his arm sparring with Johnny, to Taeyong's crush on a new pizza delivery guy. 

Jaemin demands a story from Ten in exchange for the delivery guy's name. 

“There wasn't really much happening.” Ten shrugs, words slightly slurred. “I was all alone, you guys weren't there to make my life miserable, it was very warm but not humid. Real boring, actually.” 

Jaemin blows a disappointed raspberry. “Well, the love of Taeyong's life is called Doyoung.” 

“I don't wanna hear more depressing stories.” Donghyuck announces. “I will tell you the name of Jeno's pretentious art school boyfriend for the low price of you getting up and grabbing gummy bears from the kitchen.” 

Jeno whines. “Renjun isn't pretentious.” 

Ten sticks his tongue out at Donghyuck. “Get your gummy bears yourself, loser.” 

Donghyuck throws a pillow, but it hits Kun in the head instead, who was in the middle of falling asleep. He hums, disconcerted, and blindly throws the pillow into an entirely wrong direction. 

Soon enough, there's pillows flying everywhere, and for once, Ten looks at it and it's not to the backdrop of everything he's been through the last five years. It's just his brothers, loud and care-free not because they don't know what happened to him, but because they do and they made sure he didn't go through it for nothing. For the first time in all these years, Ten can allow the thought that, maybe, one day, he can stop to worry as well. 

They have a plan, they have the words of a father none of them ever wanted, the first and only time he will ever be useful to them after he brought them all together. 

But most importantly, they have each other. And Ten decides that in this moment, whether their plan is as secure as they believe or not, that is all that matters.


End file.
